Teach Your Children Well

Not knowing where to start, I'll start with the 4 year old with the loaded gun in church. Thankfully, not mine. But my church is in upstate NY, not North Carolina.

​ A 4-year-old boy walked into a bathroom stall and found a loaded handgun after a church service in Holly Ridge on Sunday, Holly Ridge Police Chief John Maiorano said.

The man, Claude Lee Haynes III, 70, received a ticket for child endangerment.

A ticket? Is that also what he would have received if the kid had shot himself or someone else? Why even ask?

Moving south to Georgia and the daily show and tell. 

Officials in Georgia say an elementary school student suffered minor injuries after being accidentally shot by a third-grade classmate playing with a gun. 

The shooting happened Tuesday morning at Hornsby Elementary School in Augusta. Richmond County School Board spokesman Kaden Jacobs says a student brought the weapon to school and was "playing with the gun inside a desk." She says it discharged accidentally.

Accidents will happen so it's likely no one is going to be charged with anything in this case.

Moving on to Arkansas:

A 14-year-old boy from central Arkansas pleaded not guilty Tuesday to two counts of capital murder in the July 21 shooting deaths of a couple who raised him as their grandson.

Don't think I've been saving these up. They were all from today's news. I'll end with a story from CSM on an incident from a bit further back. 

By a purely political calculus, the online petition launched this week to outlaw children’s access to automatic weapons has limited prospects. Efforts to rein in the use of automatic weapons by children already failed in two state legislatures last year.

But it matters, some experts and activists say, because of the people behind the petition and their message.

Sponsoring the petition is the family of Charlie Vacca, the instructor killed one year ago by a 9-year-old New Jersey girl in pink shorts when she lost control of an Uzi rifle at a popular Arizona gun range. And the message is no broadside against Americans’ Second Amendment rights, but what the family calls a "common sense" appeal to gun owners and non-gun owners alike.

I have nothing against the average gun owner, the one who would support common sense. The ones whose knees jerk reflexively every time they hear about legislation like this I do have a problem with, though. And I fuckin' hate the NRA. 

 The Vacca family’s petition puts pressure on gun owners, gun control groups say. The shooting’s deeper impact came from a sense of compounded tragedy: One set of kids lost a father, and one girl is faced with the guilt of the accident.

“You are only 9 years old. We think about you. We are worried about you,” one of Vacca’s children, Tylor, said in a videotaped message to the girl last year. “We pray for you, and we wish you peace. Our dad would want the same thing.”

Now, opponents of the petition will have to explain why the right of a 9-year-old to shoot an automatic weapon is so important.

I join them in wishing her peace. That's a terrible thing she will have to live with.

UPDATE: I'll add this piece that was linked to from a story on the shooting in Virginia yesterday. Oh hell, there was probably more than one. It discusses why the time is never right to talk about gun violence.

The Mass Shootings Tracker, a crowd-sourced tally of mass shootings maintained by the GunsAreCool subreddit, shows that we haven't gone more than eight days without a mass shooting in the U.S. since the start of 2015 -- that doesn't leave a lot of time to grieve and regroup between shootings. We've averaged exactly one mass shooting per day since the start of the year. Forty eight days saw more than one mass shooting take place. On 18 days there were at least 3 shootings. On three days this year -- April 18, June 13 and July 15 -- there have been five shootings.

Need to link to Tbogg, too.